Last updated: April 28, 2006

Product Technical Reference

During the initial part of the semester you will focus your documentation efforts on the Operational Specification and the Design Specification.  The OpSpec should provide a clear definition of WHAT your product needs to do and the Design Spec presents your intended solution, or in other words, HOW you will solve the problem. 

Although the focus on the OpSpec will decline within 4 to 6 weeks, the OpSpec needs to be maintained through out the project and needs to precisely and accurately capture the operations the product must perform.  At the end of the project it must document what the delivered product actually does.

When it is first written, the Design Spec signals your intentions for a solution to the problem defined by the OpSpec.  As the project progresses it is important that the Design Spec accurately and precisely captures what you actually develop in code.  At the end of the project the Design Spec show be a document that will help people who may work on the project after you, understand how the product work, why it is arrange the way it is, and provide guidance on how to successfully modify it.  The final version of the Design Spec needs to capture information that is not easily deduced from reading the code.  In a similar sense it should not include or duplicate information that is best determined by looking at the code.  The Design Spec combined with the OpSpec are important and significant pieces of your product solution.